Programme Notes

Fear of being marooned at sea with no wind and the subsequent joy of being able to make headway and successfully complete a voyage; a new concerto indelibly affected by the death of the composer/conductor Oliver Knussen; and a symphony conceived on an idyllic summer holiday – all come together in tonight’s concert.

Mendelssohn was just 21 – and at university in Berlin – when he composed his overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage in 1828, the first of three overtures based around the sea, the others being The Hebrides , Op 26 in 1830 and The Fair Melusine , Op 32 in 1833. As it happened. he had never sailed on the sea until after university (and had only seen the Baltic once, in 1824), although by the time of composing The Hebrides he had suffered the effects of sea sickness, but that is another story…

The central section of Julian Anderson’s new Cello Concerto, dedicated to tonight’s soloist, ends with a chorale that he composed in memory of his friend, teacher and mentor the composer Oliver Knussen, who had died suddenly on 8 July 2018. Of course, the cello is a perfect instrument to encompass a litany for a dead friend, with its sonorous ability to hold a melodic line, as well as encompass a massive range of pitch, from deep to high. Anderson sets the work in context with other concerti he has recently written:

“Litanies is the third concerto I have composed since 2015 – it was preceded by In Lieblicher Bläue (In Lovely Blueness) for violin and orchestra (2014-2015) and The Imaginary Museum for piano and orchestra(2016-2017). These three pieces attempt three different solutions to the problem of renewing the concerto form.In the first, the solutions were partly of a spatial/theatrical nature: the violinist is offstage, then to the side of the orchestra, then in normal soloist position, and finally turns their back on the audience.Such solutions are not possible for either a piano or a cello – they are not portable instruments.In the piano concerto, the concerto form was exploded into a diverse set of six different movements, each with a different virtual ‘location’ – the metaphor was one of an imaginary journey.

“In Litanies the traditional three-movement concerto form is confronted. Moreover, the sequence of the three movements is also the traditional fast-slow-fast. The three movements are played continuously, however, and there are many cross-references between them, so the effect is deliberately ambiguous.”

Talking about the cello, Brahms said of his friend Dvorˇák’s Cello Concerto that if he had known the instrument could sound like that, he would have composed a concerto for it himself (perhaps he had forgotten his last orchestral work was a Double Concerto for Violin and Cello…). Yet he was a master at utilising the deep sonorities of the cello section in all four of his symphonies – just listen to the opening of the Second. That symphony, amazingly, had followed hard on the First, as if his creative inspiration had been let loose after his 20-year struggle to produce his First Symphony – a very serious work, awesome and tormented in conception – which had eventually seen the light of day in 1876. But within a year a new symphony was pouring onto manuscript paper while Brahms was holidaying at the peaceful Carinthian lakeside resort of Pörtschach. Such was the conducive atmosphere in this beautiful part of Austria, Brahms returned the next two summers, which saw him equally productive, resulting in his Violin Concerto (in the same key of the Second Symphony) in 1878 and a clutch of chamber works. The Second Symphony glows with the summer sun, and has an almost Dvorˇákian lyricism, largely underplayed in his other symphonies. It has even been suggested that this is Brahms’ “Pastoral” symphony following his epic First, like Beethoven’s “Pastoral” following his titanic and fateful Fifth. The first performance took place in Vienna on 30 December 1877 under Hans Richter. That same month Brahms’ friend Theodore Billroth wrote: “A happy, cheerful mood permeates the whole work. It bears all the marks of perfection, of the effortless flow of limpid thought and warm feeling.”

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847)

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Op 27

Meeresstille: Adagio –

Glückliche Fahrt: Molto allegro e vivace –Allegro maestoso

The subject of Mendelssohn’s first sea overture was perhaps suggested to him by slightly older contemporary Adolf Bernhard Marx who, in May 1828, praised Felix in print for fashioning a work based on two Goethe poems “without using Goethe’s words”. There was an implicit criticism here about one of Marx’s favourite composers, Beethoven, as he had disliked Beethoven’s cantata based on Goethe’s poems ( Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt , Op 112 from 1815, but only published in 1823), for using a chorus to depict a calm sea. Mendelssohn’s overture did not receive its first performance until 7 September 1828, and then only a private one, and he later revised it in 1834, before being published in 1835.

Given the status of Mendelssohn’s family (his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, is regarded as the “father of German Philosophy”), it is perhaps no surprise that Felix actually knew Goethe, who was 50 years Felix’s senior. They had first met when Mendelssohn was only 12 and, by all reports, he and “the father of German literature” got on like a house on fire, meeting on other occasions too.

We can only wonder if Felix actually discussed his musical setting of Goethe’s poems, which had been written in 1787 when the author had been becalmed himself of Sicily. Even though Mendelssohn dispensed with the poems, it is perhaps useful to quote them here.

Meeresstille

Tiefe Stille herrscht im Wasser

Ohne Regung ruht das Meer, Und bekümmert sieht der Schiffer

Glatte Fläche rings umher.

Keine Luft von keiner Seite!

Todesstille fürchterlich!

In der ungeheuern Weite

Reget keine Welle sich.

Glückliche Fahrt

Die Nebel zerreißen, Der Himmel ist helle, Und Äolus löset

Das ängstliche Band. Es säuseln die Winde, Es rührt sich der Schiffer.

Geschwinde! Geschwinde!

Es teilt sich die Welle, Es naht sich die Ferne; Schon seh’ ich das Land!

Mendelssohn himself wrote: “I planned the introduction in this way. A note is gently sustained by the strings for a long while, hovering here and there and trembling, barely audible, so that in the slowest Adagio, now the basses, now the violins, rest on the same note for several bars. Everything stirs sluggishly from the passage with heavy tedium. Finally, it comes to a halt with thick chords and the Prosperous Voyage sets out. Now all the wind instruments, the timpani, oboes and flutes begin and play merrily to the end.”

To achieve his goal, Mendelssohn added piccolo, contrabassoon and a (now defunct) serpent as well as a third trumpet to his orchestral palette. He retained Beethoven’s D major for the key, but – in true 19th-century Romantic fashion – created a musical tone picture to emulate Goethe’s words. And it is probably relevant that Mendelssohn actually took up painting at this time.

The opening Adagio, just 48-bars long (out of 517 bars), lasts nearly a third of the total time, the slow

Calm Sea

Deep stillness reigns over the water

Without motion rests the sea, So the skipper looks troubled

At the flat surface everywhere. No breath of air from anywhere!

Terrifying deathly stillness!

Across the immense distance

No wave stirs.

Prosperous Voyage

The mists are torn apart, The sky is bright, And Aeolus releases chordal changes evoking the sense of solitude and ennui such enforced inactivity brings. Then the flute twice introduces a little scurrying phrase which offers the prospect of a change in the weather, and Mendelssohn illustrates this in a 50bar transition passage, molto allegro, as the wind picks up dramatically for the woodwind to burst in with a breezily joyful melody, later tempered by a more sedate, almost hymn-like theme. The overture ends as if the ship has landed, trumpets announcing its arrival in port, and the dying away and quiet ending indicates relief that dry land has –at last – been reached.

The fearful bonds. The winds start rustling, The skipper rouses himself. Quickly! Quickly!

The waves divide, The distance shortens, I can already see land!

Instrumentation of this work

Strings: 1st & 2nd violins, violas, cellos, double basses

Woodwinds: flutes (2), piccolo (1), oboes (2), clarinets (2), bassoons (2), contrabassoon (1)

Brass:horns (2), trumpets (3)

Timpani

Julian Anderson (born 1967)

Litanies (2018-2019) (Asian premiére)

Concerto for Cello and Orchestra

Co-commissioned by Radio France, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Swedish Chamber Orchestra & Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne

Premiered on 12 February 2020 at Paris’ Auditorium de Radio France with tonight’s soloist accompanied by the Orchestre National de France under Pascal Rophé, Julian Anderson’s Litanies should have arrived in Hong Kong the following month for its Asian première, but world events put paid to that. Now, at last – just shy of three years later – Alban Gerhardt bridges the gap and performs the work tonight.

Litanies , which recently won the 2023 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, is Julian Anderson’s third major concerto, a form which proved to be a major focus to his compositions over a six-year period, but it is this Cello Concerto that adopts the most traditional form of the three. It also carries the most concentrated title, as Anderson seeks to reinvent the concerto for the 21st century. But few, if any, cello concerto forbears have required the returning of the fourth string midway through the music.

In his own programme note Julian Anderson writes:

“ Litanies was two years in the making. Composing for cellist Alban Gerhardt, a magnificent soloist with an exceptionally wide-ranging musical repertoire, was a key stimulus throughout.In Litanies the cello is re-examined string by string: each is given its own character and colours.Of these the first string (A) is the trigger sound for the whole piece and recurs at the joins between each of the work's three movements, which play without interruption.Starting from that springboard, the music at first playfully explores a lighthearted dialogue between the cellist and the orchestra – they share or swap sounds, passing them back and forth, cheerfully echoing and misunderstanding each other.

“A more intense mood develops in the central slow movement, where we hear the lowest string of the cello for the first time in the first of a long sequence of increasingly passionate and extended melodies. The work becomes a double threnody for the Cathedral of Notre Dame which was destroyed by fire in April 2019 and for my friend and much-missed colleague Oliver Knussen, who died some months before. Chords and melodies appear only to disappear as if gradually melting under intense heat.At the centre of the movement –and the work – comes the traditional cadenza, but with an unusual twist: the cello’s lowest string is tuned down a tone [from C to B-flat], and the whole cadenza is on the harmonics of this retuned open string. It is a sound both luminous and frightening, as the higher the soloist climbs up the string, the more the sounds become like gasps or even screams. Against this a monstrous pulse is heard in the orchestra, gradually slowing down to a point of standstill: there is a sense of time running out.Finally, the cellist leads the orchestra in a hymn of praise – a tribute to a departed friend and a memorial to a 37-year-long friendship.

“Out of the final chords the last movement springs to life, defiant, dancing.As the dancing gathers strength, a new soloist challenges the cellist to a duel: the percussionist interrupts the cello with increasing force, finally attempting a cadenza of its own ‘as if at all costs to stop the progress of the music’ (in the words of Carl Nielsen, whose Fifth Symphony includes an analogously destructive percussion cadenza ). The coda takes off in a different direction: the cellist sings climbing ecstatically higher and higher, eventually disappearing off into the ether. This conclusion was inspired by the beautiful final lines of the Noh-play Hagoromo by Zeami, as translated by Arthur Waley:

‘...Past the Floating Islands, through the feet of the clouds she flies Over the mountain of Ashitaka, the high peak of Fuji, Very faint her form, Mingled with the mists of heaven; Now lost to sight.’

“Programme music? Perhaps.But why not, if the context justifies it?”

Instrumentation of this work

Strings: 1st & 2nd violins, violas, cellos, double basses

Woodwinds: flute (1), flute/piccolo/alto flute (1), oboe (1), oboe/English horn (1), clarinet (1), clarinet/bass clarinet (1), bassoon (1), bassoon/contrabassoon (1)

Brass:horns (2), trumpets (2), trombone (1)

Percussion:tubular bells, suspended cymbals, sizzle cymbal, tam-tam, water bell, bell tree, steel drums, bass drum, congas, tumbas, claves, anklung, maraca, tom-toms

Harp, piano/synthesiser

Solo cello

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)

Symphony No 2 in D, Op 73

Allegro non troppo

Adagio no troppo – L’istesso tempo ma grazioso

Allegretto grazioso (quasi andantino) –Presto ma non assai – Tempo primo

Allegretto con spirito

Unlike Mendelssohn’s overture, Brahms’ orchestral works have no suggestion of programmatic influences. In this sense he was the true successor to Beethoven, and no composer since has achieved such outstanding success within these given parameters. He was not interested in opera or in the line taken by his contemporary Wagner: his music is total music with no need for extra-musical references, and his Second Symphony is one of his greatest.

From a technical point of view, the opening cello and bass phrase (D–C-sharp–D) becomes the germ for each of the movements (sometimes with the semitone turn moving up rather than down) but the inspiration is seamless and there is no feeling of artifice in the ebb and flow of the music. As ever with Brahms, he delights in slightly off-balancing the listener. Here triplets play against duplets, themes are started on off-beats (a favourite trick, of his mentor Robert Schumann) and mood changes are handled with great skill and subtlety proving that, however long it took Brahms to feel at home with symphonic form, he was a master when he finally put pen to manuscript paper.

With the first three movements revelling in triple time, the work very much has the feeling of a homage to the Viennese waltz or Austrian Ländler However, despite the relaxed opening with both first and second subjects calm and lyrical, the first movement is not totally bathed in sunshine. Trombones and tuba (in the First Symphony held in check until the Finale ) cast shadows over the landscape and there are some powerful, stormy passages in the development, before the shortened recapitulation and the delightful coda, introduced by a magical horn solo with chirpy wind and pizzicato strings to close.

The Adagio, richly conceived in B major, starts in 4/4 (a low descending string theme with rising bassoon counterpoint) but the second subject (ma grazioso), although at the same tempo, is in 12/8, triplet-based yet again. As in the first movement, power and more serious feelings are always nearby, building to a magnificent climax in the middle of the movement. Eventually the triplets disappear, leaving pulsing horn and timpani to close the movement.

Brahms’ playful combination of triple and duple times is again to the fore in the third movement. In G major, this is a combination of variation and rondo form, and takes the place of the earlier symphonic minuets (Mozart and Haydn) and later scherzos (Beethoven and Bruckner). Opening in 3/4, with oboe over pizzicato strings, the main Allegretto grazioso theme is repeated twice with two sections separating each, both marked Presto ma non assai. The first of these is the main theme skilfully transmuted into 2/4 time (with more than a reminiscence of Tchaikovsky); the second takes a subsidiary idea from the first theme and treats it in 3/8 time (is there a Scottish resonance here?). Trumpets, trombones, tuba and timpani are omitted entirely and the whole movement is delicately scored, once again ending quietly.

The spirited Finale starts quietly, with sotto voce strings and gentle wind solos. But Brahms is lulling us into a false sense of security. Suddenly the theme is played with full force – high-spirited energy and brilliance being the movement’s hallmarks. A slight relaxing in pace ushers in the second subject, warmly resonant for strings, which is well worth slowing down for. For those who know Mahler’s First Symphony, you can find the falling fourths he uses in his opening movement, here used by Brahms in a moment of calm repose. Given that Mahler’s symphony postdates Brahms’ by only eight years, perhaps Mahler had Brahms’ falling fourths etched in his brain. Typically Brahmsian are both the syncopated play of quavers against triplets, and the closing strident scales and blazing full brass peroration that underpin the symphony’s final chords. There is no other music as genuinely heart-warming as this. If only all summers could be as good as the one Brahms obviously had in 1877.

Instrumentation of this work

Strings: 1st & 2nd violins, violas, cellos, double basses

Woodwinds: flutes (2), oboes (2), clarinets (2), bassoons (2) Brass: horns (4), trumpets (2), trombones (3), tuba (1) Timpani

© Nick Breckenfield, 2023 British programme-note writer Nick Breckenfield was the Classical Music and Opera Editor for whatsonwhen.com for 13 years and now works for the Borletti-Buitoni Trust which awards young classical music artists